The Soviet War Memorial (Tiergarten) is one of several war memorials in Berlin, capital city of Germany, erected by the Soviet Union to commemorate its war dead, particularly the 80,000 soldiers of the Soviet Armed Forces who died during the Battle of Berlin in April and May 1945. The memorial is located in the Großer Tiergarten, a large public park to the west of the city centre, on the north side of the east-west Straße des 17. Juni (17 June Street) in the Tiergarten locality. This memorial was erected in 1945, within a few months of the capture of the city.

Re-imagined then and now

1975, guarded by Red Army troops, and today

Soviet
War Memorial Tiergarten was erected on Remembrance Day, 1945, in the
hope the British would simply vacate their area and let the Soviets move
their zone further into here. Ironically, it was situated at the exact
point where Speer had planned his north-south/east-west axis for his
planned capital. The material for the monument too came from Hitler's
Chancellery, and behind lie today the bodies of 2 200 soldiers. It was
discovered in 1967 that below the Nazis had constructed three motorway
tunnels up to 220 metres in length.
The war memorial itself was built to honour Soviet soldiers who fell
in the battles against the German army in the Second World War. It was
located at the 17 June Street very close to the German parliament - the
Reichstag - in what would soon become West-Germany which meant that it
was beyond everyday reach for the Soviet Army. To be able to visit the
memorial it was agreed that Red Army troops had free passage to the
memorial on certain days of remembrance. Around the time in the early
1960ies when the Berlin Wall was erected the presence of Soviet troops
on the streets of Berlin awoke much anger among the West-Berliners and
Soviet military vehicles was on many occasions bombarded with stones
from angry protesters. In fact, in the 1970s there was the bizarre
situation where a Soviet guard of honour had had a pot-shot taken at him
from a passing motorist, resulting in British soldiers guarding Soviet
guards guarding this monument.
The memorial is constructed as an arch with a bronze soldier on top of
it. The design actually resembles the Brandenburger Gate which is
located only 100 metres away. The inscription on the side of the memorial reads:

ETERNAL
GLORY TO HEROES WHO FELL IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST THE GERMAN FASCIST
INVADERS FOR THE FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE OF THE SOVIET UNION

The area in 1945 and brief footage of the site today. Early photographs show the memorial standing in a wilderness of ruins,
the Tiergarten having been destroyed by incendiary bombs and then
stripped of timber for firewood during the last months of the war.
Today, it is surrounded by the extensive woodlands of the reconstituted
Tiergarten. Although the memorial stood in the British sector of Berlin,
its construction was supported by all the Allied powers. Throughout the
Cold War, Soviet honor guards from the Soviet sector (East Berlin) were
sent to stand watch at the memorial. Design Aerial view of the memorial
with honor guards, West Berlin, 1983 Built in a style similar to other
Soviet World War II monuments once found all over the former Eastern
bloc, the memorial takes the form of a curved stoa topped by a large
statue of a Soviet soldier. It is set in landscaped gardens and flanked
by two Red Army ML-20 152mm gun-howitzer artillery pieces and two T-34
tanks. Behind the memorial is an outdoor museum showing photographs of
the memorial's construction and giving a guide to other memorials in the
Berlin area. A large Cyrillic inscription is written underneath the
soldier statue, which is translated as "Eternal glory to heroes who fell
in battle with the German fascist invaders for the freedom and
independence of the Soviet Union". The Soviets built the statue with the
soldier's arm in a position to symbolize the Red Army's putting down of
the Nazi German state. The memorial was designed by architect Mikhail
Gorvits with the monument of the Soviet soldier by sculptors Vladimir
Tsigal and Lev Kerbel. A legend that the memorial was built from
stonework taken from the destroyed Reich Chancellery is untrue, but
remains popular and persists. The memorial today The memorial is still a
site of active commemoration. On the anniversary of VE Day, (8 May),
wreath-laying ceremonies are held at the memorial. It is a site of
pilgrimage for war veterans from the countries of the former Soviet
Union. It is also a popular tourist attraction, since it is much closer
to the centre of the city than the larger Soviet war memorial at
Treptower Park. The memorial is maintained by the City of Berlin. Front
of the Soviet War Memorial in Tiergarten There is a sign next to the
monument explaining in English, German and Russian that this is the
burial site of some 2,000 fallen Soviet soldiers. It is located in the
heart of Berlin along one of the major roads with a clear sight of the
Reichstag and the Brandenburg gate, both symbols of the city. Some of
the marble used to build it came from the destroyed government buildings
nearby, and it is built on a place which Adolf Hitler meant to devote
to Welthauptstadt Germania. Besides the main inscription, the columns
state names of only some dead Heroes of the Soviet Union buried
here. It has earned some unflattering nicknames, such as the "Tomb of
the Unknown Rapist", from the local population with references to
crimes committed by Soviet occupation troops. The monument is
built in the British sector of (western) Berlin; after the Berlin wall
was erected in 1961, the monument was seen as a sign of communist
provocation on West Berlin soil and had to be protected from West
Berliners by British soldiers. In 1970 a neo-Nazi, Ekkehard Weil,
shot and severely wounded one of the Soviet honour guards at the
monument. In 2010, the monument was vandalized just before Victory in
Europe Day celebrations with red graffiti that read "thieves,
murderers, rapists", sparking a protest from the Russian embassy in
Berlin that accused German authorities of not taking sufficient measures
to protect the monument. The German tabloid Bild launched a
Bundestag-petition to remove the Soviet tanks from the memorial site as a
response to the Crimean crisis in 2014, calling them a "martial war
symbol".

With the Reichstag in the background. The
last two photos are looking towards the Brandenburg Gate today from
the memorial, and the same view ten years after the war's end.

Students standing directly in front during our 2013 trip

The same spot re-imagined through Photoshop

Memorial to Homosexual Victims in Tiergarten

Paragraph
175 made homosexuality illegal in 1871; it was broadened under
Nazism to allow deportation of gay men to concentration camps.

Homosexuals, were manifestly of no racial
value; between 1934 and 1938 the number prosecuted annually under
Paragraph 175 of the Reich Criminal Code rose by a factor of ten to
8,000. Since criminality was viewed as hereditary, those who broke
the law were also targeted as asocial. The November 1933 Law against
Dangerous Habitual Criminals authorized the castration of sexual
offenders.

It
was only completely revoked in 1994 after German reunification. In
2002, the German government formally pardoned all homosexuals
convicted by the Nazis and in 2003 approved the plan for the Berlin
memorial. At
the memorial's unveiling in May 2009, the International Gay and
Lesbian Association (ILGA) issued a statement pointing out the
importance of the monument's location: "It is in the centre of the
city from where decades ago the policies of extermination of
homosexual people along with such groups as Jews, gypsies, Jehovah's
witnesses and political dissidents, was conceived and the deadly
orders were given." This central placement was an effort to end the
traditional peripheralisation of the stories of gay victims of Nazi
atrocities, who continued to be persecuted after the war, and who
are largely left out of traditional historical accounts of the
Holocaust. As Berlin mayor Klaus Wowerit, who happens to be the
city's first openly gay mayor, pointed out when the memorial was
first opened, the placement of this monument in the centre of Berlin
was meant to form a contrast with the Nazis, who were "a society
that did not abolish unjust verdicts, but partially continued to
implement them; a society which did not acknowledge a group of people
as victims, only because they chose another way of life."

In
fact, my students and I were shocked to find NO plaque or
information at all to explain what this ugly monument actually is
supposed to be for; one questioned why the government had created an anti-gay monument.

Right across is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas)

Aerial photo of the Memorial site

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineers Buro Happold and consists of a 19,000 square metre site covered with 2,711 stelae arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The stelae are 7.8' long, 3' 1.5" wide and vary in height from 0.2m to 4.8m (8" to 15'9") and were designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere; a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason. A 2005 copy of the Foundation for the Memorial's official English tourist pamphlet, however, states that the design represents a radical approach to the traditional concept of a memorial, partly because Eisenman did not use any symbolism. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem.

Easyjet apologises for photoshoot at Holocaust memorial

Easyjet was forced to apologise after fashion photographs shot at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin were published in its in-flight magazine. In the pictures, models pose in designer clothes among the concrete blocks of the "Field of Stelae". The budget airline said it was unaware of the images until they appeared in the magazine, which is published by a company called INK whose relationship with Easyjet was under review.

Men cruising men. At the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. Note the man bottom left who stripped off

Tiergartenstraße 4

The headquarters of the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil- und Anstaltspflege
and the site today, taken over by a graffiti- covered husk of rusted
metal intended to symbolise something intentionally left vague and
meaningless.Shortly after the start of the war, Hitler signed
an order, backdated to 1 September 1939, authorising the systematic
killing of mentally and physically handicapped adults and children.
Authorisation to direct the program was given on Hitler’s personal
stationary to Philipp Bouhler, head of the Führer’s Chancellery, and
Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician. The code-name of this
secret program, “Aktion T-4,” derived from the address of the
building here on Tiergartenstrasse 4, from which the program was
directed. Killings of deformed children had already started before
the war. The killings, now extended to adults as well, were conducted
by lethal injection or carbon monoxide gassing at several sites
disguised as hospitals or nursing homes. These killings marked a
further escalation of the eugenic practices that had begun with the
Sterilisation Law in 1933.

As early as 1935, [Hitler] told a
senior Nazi medic that 'if war should break out, he would take up the
euthanasia question and implement it'. In fact, he did not even wait
for the war. In July 1939 he initiated what became known as the
Aktion T-4. It was, he said,
'right that the worthless lives of seriously
ill mental patients should be got rid of. Here, as with the persecution
of the Jews and Gypsies, the regime encountered little popular
resistance and some active support. In a poll of 200 parents of mentally
retarded children conducted in Saxony, 73 per cent had answered
'yes' to the question: 'Would you agree to the painless curtailment of
the life of your child if experts had established that it was suffering
from incurable idiocy?' Some parents actually petitioned Hitler to
allow their abnormal children to be killed. Apart from the Catholic
Bishop Clemens von Galen, whose sermons against the euthanasia
programme in July and August 1941 led to a temporary halt in the
killings, only a handful of other individuals openly challenged 'the
principle that you can kill "unproductive" human beings'. Others
who objected turn out, on closer inspection, merely to have disliked
the procedures involved. Some wished for formal legality - a proper
decree and public 'sentencing'; others (especially those living near the
asylums) simply wanted the killing to be carried out less
obtrusively.

Despite
the secrecy of the programme, it was impossible to conceal killing
on such a scale, as relatives demanded explanations for the sudden and
unexpected deaths of their loved ones. Increasing numbers of
complaints and demands for criminal investigations made it necessary
to inform the Reich Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of the
Interior of Hitler’s secret order which led to Hitler’s decision to
end the program on 24 August 1941 after more than 70,000 patients had
been killed. Killings especially of handicapped children continued
in secret, however, until the end of the war. Under the code-name
“Aktion 14 f 13” the killing program was also extended to Jewish
inmates of concentration camps in Germany. Many of the T-4 personnel
were transferred to occupied Poland where they supplied the technical
expertise for the systematic killing by gas of approximately three
million Jews in the extermination camps set up for the “Final Solution
of the Jewish Question.

Fascist-era embassies along Tiergartenstraße

The
Spanish embassy which was constructed through Speer's Office of the
Inspector-General for buildings and which shows a similar style favoured
by the Nazis. It reopened in 2003 after war damage was repaired and
fascist symbols removed.

The
embassies of Italy and Japan respectively. The Italian was the first
to have been completed in the Tiergarten in 1938. It was rebuilt in
the 1990s but kept its fascist symbols. According to David Irving in
his book Göring: A Biography, this was the site of one of Goering's greatest humiliations,

when
he saw the fabulous decoration that he coveted, the diamond-studded
Collar of the Annunziata, bestowed at the Italian embassy upon his
smirking rival [Ribbentrop]. He took it as a deliberate slight and
raised hell at every level up to the king of Italy, being mollified only
by the award, twelve months later, of the identical Collar in
consolation.

The
Japanese embassy on the right too maintains its symbols of fascist
ideology a reminder of the man-made tsunami it had launched upon
humanity beginning in 1931 which required two atomic bombs and countless
allied lives and suffering to put an end to.
On November 24, 1937 Hitler attended a reception here, given by the
Japanese Ambassador Mushakoji in Berlin on the anniversary of the
Anti-Comintern Pact.

The former Embassy of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia at Rauchstraße in
1938 and today, where it serves as the offices of the German Council on
Foreign Relations ( Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik,
DGAP). The building was completed in 1938/39 by Werner March, the
architect of Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, as the diplomatic mission for the
Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The property at Rauchstraße 17 was owned by the
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family until 1938. The family was forced to sell
the property to the German Reich for 170,000 reichsmarks shortly before
they emigrated. The property at Rauchstraße 18 was handed over to the
German Reich in accordance with a 1940 expropriation resolution. Until
the occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941, Ivo Andric, who would later win
the Nobel Prize for Literature, was stationed in the new building as
Yugoslav ambassador. Afterwards, the building was used by German Reich
and party officials. After Germany’s surrender in 1945, the building was
given back to the People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav
military mission resided in the building until 1953, when it moved to
Grunewald. Beginning in 1953, the building housed the Supreme
Restitution Court of the Allied Forces in Berlin. On June 29, 1964, the
court accepted the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family’s reimbursement claim
and ordered the People’s Republic of Yugoslavia to cede a co-ownership
share in the building.

Berlin Victory Column (Siegessäule)

Designed
by Heinrich Strack after 1864 to commemorate the Prussian victory in
the Danish-Prussian war, by the time it was inaugurated on 2 September
1873 Prussia had also defeated Austria in the Austro-Prussian War and
France in the Franco-Prussian War (1870/1871), giving the statue a new
purpose. In 1939 the Nazis
relocated the pillar to its present location at the Großer Stern (Great
Star), a large intersection on the visual city axis that leads from the
former Berliner Stadtschloss (Berlin City Palace) through the
Brandenburg Gate to the western parts of Berlin. At the same time, the
pillar was augmented by another 7.5 meters, giving it its present height
of 66.89 meters. The monument survived World War II without much
damage. The relocation of the monument probably saved it from
destruction, as its old site in front of the Reichstag was completely
destroyed in the war.

[B]y
by 28 April, troops of the 3rd Shock Army, advancing from
the northern districts, were in sight of the Siegessaule column in the
Tiergarten. Red Army soldiers nicknamed it the `tall woman' because of
the statue of winged victory on the top. The German defenders were
now reduced to a strip less than five kilometres in width and fifteen in
length. It ran from Alexanderplatz in the east to Charlottenburg and the
Reichssportsfeld in the west, from where Artur Axmann's Hitler Youth
detachments desperately defended the bridges over the Havel. Weidling's
artillery commander, Colonel Wohlermann, gazed around in
horror from the gun platform at the top of the vast concrete Zoo flak
tower. `One had a panoramic view of the burning, smouldering and
smoking great city, a scene which again and again shook one to the
core.'
Yet General Krebs still pandered to Hitler's belief that Wenck's army
was about to arrive from the south-west. Beevor (340) Berlin: The Downfall 1945

Before the war with the Eiserner Hindenburg in front and after.
The monument fell within the French section of Berlin, given them when
the British realised they were growing bankrupt from the war and
required assistance.

The
French perpetrated a few acts of childish spite: they mutilated a few
inscriptions on the Siegessäule – or Victory Column – in the Tiergarten,
which commemorated German triumph in the Franco-German War, and
festooned it with French tricolours. In Schwanenwerder they found a
fragment of the Tuileries Palace which had been burned down by the Paris
Communards in 1871, and removed a high-minded panel that talked of the
fate of nations. The Germans themselves did not waste much time on the
French – they realised they were second-division conquerors.

Tour of the Bendler Block (left) and trailer for the Tom Cruise ego-project Valkyrie for which the bendlerblock provided the controversial location.

The building in 1942 and now. The Bendler Block, site of Hitler's speech of February 3, 1933, on "Lebensraum in the east," is best remembered as the centre of the attempt to overthrow the National Socialist regime on July 20, 1944. The coup instantly collapsed, and Hitler dispatched various forces to round up the plotters and the plot organisers. Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim, and Lieutenant Werner von Haeften were caught late in the evening and summarily executed by firing squad in the courtyard of the Bendler Block (the War Ministry building). Hitler ultimately oversaw the purge and execution (in some cases, accompanied by show trials) of some 5,000 persons he believed were implicated in the plot. All were known opponents of the Nazi regime. Many were tortured to death. Some were hanged by the neck using piano wire. Stauffenberg and the other plotters are remembered in modern Germany as heroes of the anti-Nazi resistance and today the courtyard in the centre of the Bendler Block is dedicated to the memory of the officers executed here on the night of July 20, 1944:

Memorial in the courtyard inside the former Wehrmacht HQ where Von Stauffenberg was shot after his unsuccessful plot.

In the courtyard below in the dim rays of the blackout-hooded headlights of an Army car the four officers were quickly dispatched by a firing squad. Eyewitnesses say there was much tumult and shouting, mostly by the guards, who were in a hurry because of the danger of a bombing attack – British planes had been over Berlin almost every night that summer. Stauffenberg died crying, ”Long live our sacred Germany!”

Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg's office within with the swastika motif remaining on the parquet, and the memorial to the members of the July Plot shot without.

The photo on the left was taken the day after the summary executions. You can see the mound of sand left over from construction work in front of which the the condemned men stood before being shot down. The photo on the right shows the ϟϟ and Wehrmacht.

Zhukov's turn at the end of the war whilst nearby damage from the battle of Berlin left untouched.
The military resistance has been criticised by historians for failing to act until the war was lost and for pursuing unrealistic nationalist goals. The following selection from a Gestapo report lists Stauffenberg’s conditions for a negotiated peace allegedly transmitted to England by unnamed emissaries in May 1944. They include restoration of Germany’s 1914 borders, the retention of Austria and the Sudetenland, and continuation of the war, if necessary, in the east:

The recent interrogation of Captain [Hermann] Kaiser produces evidence that Stauffenberg
had two contacts with the English, via two go-betweens. These contacts are now being investigated in detail. On May 25, Stauffenberg had already worked out a memo for Kaiser as to
matters of negotiation with the enemy:

1 Immediate abandonment of aerial warfare.

2 Abandonment of invasion plans.

3 Avoidance of further bloodshed.

4 Continuing function of defence strength in the East. Evacuation of all occupied regions in the North, West, and South.

5 Renunciation of any occupation.

6 Free government, independent, self-chosen constitution.

7 Full cooperation in the carrying out of truce conditions and in peace preparations.

8 Reich border of 1914 in the east.
Retention of Austria and the Sudetenland within the Reich.
Autonomy of Alsace-Lorraine.
Acquisition of the Tyrol as far as Bozen, Meran.

9 Vigorous reconstruction with joint efforts for European reconstruction.

10 Nations to deal with own criminals.

11 Restoration of honour, self-respect, and respect for others.

At the end of June 1944, Kaiser learned from [Carl Friedrich] Goerdeler that inquiries about
the clique of conspirators had been made from highest English quarters. Stauffenberg transmitted:

(a) a list of individuals who were to be participants in future negotiations with England;

(b) the wish that Austria remain with the Reich;(c) the request that a reckoning with the war criminals should be left to the future German government.

Kaiser’s diary, which covered a period from May 9 to July 15, and which contains an abundance of clues, is being made use of at the moment.